Thursday, July 19, 2018

What to do if we are doomed

A world of extinction and catastrophe, a world in which harmony with nature had long been foreclosed. My partner and I had, in our selfishness, doomed our daughter to life on a dystopian planet, and I could see no way to shield her from the future.

Anyone who pays much attention to climate change knows the outlook is grim. It’s not unreasonable to say that the challenge we face today is the greatest the human species has ever confronted. And anyone who pays much attention to politics can assume we’re almost certainly going to botch it. ...

Some people might say the mistake was having a child in the first place. As Maggie Astor reported, more and more people are deciding not to have children because of climate change. This concern, conscious or unconscious, is no doubt contributing to the United States’ record-low birthrate. ...

Take the widely cited 2017 research letter by the geographer Seth Wynes and the environmental scientist Kimberly Nicholas, which argues that the most effective steps any of us can take to decrease carbon emissions are to eat a plant-based diet, avoid flying, live car free and have one fewer child — the last having the most significant impact by far. ...

To take Wynes and Nicholas’s recommendations to heart would mean cutting oneself off from modern life. It would mean choosing a hermetic, isolated existence and giving up any deep connection to the future. Indeed, taking Wynes and Nicholas’s argument seriously would mean acknowledging that the only truly moral response to global climate change is to commit suicide. There is simply no more effective way to shrink your carbon footprint. Once you’re dead, you won’t use any more electricity, you won’t eat any more meat, you won’t burn any more gasoline, and you certainly won’t have any more children. If you really want to save the planet, you should die. ...

When my daughter was born I felt a love and connection I’d never felt before: a surge of tenderness harrowing in its intensity. I knew that I would kill for her, ...

If Scranton really believes all this, then the logical conclusion is not to kill himself. That will not solve anything. It is to kill for the sake of his daughter.

He should favor a World War III, the purpose of which is to exterminate everyone from China, India, and Africa. That is where population growth and economic development will cause those disastrous carbon emissions.

Going vegan or avoiding flying is silly. Such personal decisions will have no effect on carbon emissions, as he recognizes in his essay. Neither will any other likely policy. Only massive war and genocide have any hope of saving us.

I think that he has greatly exaggerated the harm from climate change, but that is not the point here. If you are convinced that billions of people are destroying the planet, what can you do? Killing billions of people is drastic, but the climate change doomsayers present such a bleak picture of the future that killing billions may be preferable.